For John Doyle to write about Canadian television is to be expected. For him to write a whole book about Irish television and its impact on the country and his childhood, not only comes as a bit of a surprise, but as a pleasant one at that.

Also just as surprising, as one learns when one talks to Doyle, is just how the box in the corner of the parlour with the flickering black and white lights on the screen profoundly affected his own life, maybe even altering its course forever.

?The quality of the Guinness here is excellent,? Doyle comments as we settle into our snug at The Foggy Dew on King Street West. He settles in behind the table, somewhat glad to be static for a few minutes. He has just concluded conducting an interview at another establishment and can now rely on someone else asking the questions. He had also just arrived back from a hectic book tour, and a successful book launch in Toronto (see story,) earlier in the month, which saw a deluge of Canadian television stars come out to celebrate his new book.

?They?re all afraid of me?I?m only joking when I say that!? he adds quickly. ?In spite of my reputation as an acerbic columnist, I get on well with a lot of them in the Canadian television industry. I am very positive about Canadian television.?

But the subject of his new book, A Great Feast of Light, is actually about television in Ireland, and its impact not only on his childhood but also on his life?s work, and its effects on the entire Irish nation. But unlike many situations on television, which are resolved within an hour or half-hour slot, Doyle?s journey towards penning his book was a long time in coming. It all began with a proposal from a Canadian publishing company.

?I started because I was asked about five years ago after I started writing my daily column for the Globe. [They said] come to us first. It was an open invitation,? he says. He replied, ?Thanks but no thanks?[Then] another publisher expressed interest. So I got myself an agent.?

He began discussions with the publishers about what type of book it was that he wanted to write. Doyle had a few hard-and-fast ground rules that he insisted upon. Firstly, that ?it be a different kind of Irish memoir, one that is not sentimental.? (As fellow Irish writer James Joyce once wrote, ?sentimentality is unearned emotion.?)

?All of those books were fine books?but characterized by a kind of nostalgia for an older Ireland, which creates a natural nostalgia for a time when?people were poorer,? he says. Doyle wanted his book to be different, to write a book that ?was more realistic about the time and place that I grew up.? ?As a TV critic, I was in a unique position?to add to the canon of recent Irish history about the significant implications of changing Irish society,? he says of the introduction of television to Ireland. ?I felt it was time for someone to tackle that topic.

While I was writing it, I tried to avoid reading Irish memoirs.? While he had heard of Irish memoirs like It?s A Long Way From Penny Apples by Bill Cullen, he found that ?the things that influenced me were Nick Hornby?s books like Fever Pitch. It?s a unique sort of memoir.? The book took three years to write, and was delivered to the publishers this past spring.

?It was a difficult, at times grueling experience. I had to write five columns a week,? he says. ?The only day I could work on it was on Sunday, locked in my room, from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.?

There were payoffs along the way though, such as giving him an excuse ? as though anyone needs one ? to return to Ireland to conduct research for the book, usually for about a week at a time. His tours included his childhood hometown of Nenagh, County Tipperary, Carrick-on-Shannon, County Leitrim, and the Dublin neighbourhood of Raheny. His visits would see him ?writing furiously, taking notes, talking to my parents, with them telling me stories of my childhood which would unlock other stories of my own.?

On a visit to County Leitrim last fall, Doyle took out one beautiful morning to retrace some of his childhood steps out in the countryside. ?There was a lovely mist on the river Shannon, very early in the morning,? he remembers. He walked along the country roads, taking notes of signs and familiar landmarks he recalled from his younger days.

?I?m surprised that no one alerted the Gardai that there was a strange man taking notes!? he says with a laugh. Though the book is filled with anecdotes and stories about Ireland and offers a unique glimpse on the Ireland of Doyle?s youth, he is still undecided as to whether he wants it to be published back home.

?That remains up in the air,? he concedes. ?I?m not sure about having it published in Ireland. Out of respect to them, some people who are still alive might not agree with my version of events.?

Even though he still pays great homage to his Irish roots, ?Canada is where I live and work and write and my main constituency is in Canada?I think readers here in Canada who came from Ireland, many of the stories will strike a chord with them. At the same time, I think that it?s important for people to remember that it?s not an autobiography. A memoir is how you remember it. And there is a distinction between the two.?

One of the indisputable facts in the book though is that Ireland did not get its own television broadcaster, Radio Telefis Eireann, until New Year?s Eve 1961, more than a decade and a half after many other nations, such as America, Britain and even Canada had already set up national broadcasters.

?The government of the day did not see the creation of an Irish TV service as a priority,? Doyle explains. ?They realized that the people who had TVs were only watching British TV with no Irish alternative.? Even before RTE came to life though, TV offered the Irish a unique worldview of other peoples. One of the best models for the Irish to follow was that set by the Welsh across the Irish Sea.

Thanks to the Welsh broadcaster HTV, Doyle and other Irish viewers could see that ?The Welsh were just as anxious to preserve their language as the Irish were?Ireland wasn?t unique. Ireland wasn?t the only place in the world where people were trying to preserve the language of the people.?

The advent of TV ?sort of gave you the sense that Ireland is part of the world.? Some Irish people did not want to use RTE for those purposes though, to the exclusion of other ?foreign? broadcasters, which were seen as subversive elements.

?There was a time when the older generation wanted RTE and only RTE?because it spoke to them,? says Doyle. Meanwhile, the younger generation clamoured for shows like Top of the Pops and Match of the Day on English television. One Irish show that Doyle remembers fondly though was a detective show set in the west of Ireland called O?Doul, which was performed in Gaelic.

?It had great theme music to it,? he remembers. ?It was exciting to see a cop show that was in Irish, secondly set in Ireland and whose main character was called Doyle/O?Doul?That?s one of those things that sticks in a child?s memory forever.?

One of the important qualities of the book for Doyle is that ?I?m writing from a child?s perspective, a child?s impression?It was a pleasure to allow my mind to soak up the memory of the Ireland of my childhood and adolescence.?

With any type of research comes new discoveries for the researcher, but for Doyle the discoveries were more personal than academic. ?In researching and writing the book, I discovered how happy I was and the Doyle family was.? Recalling his years in Carrick-on-Shannon, he was surprised to find out how he and his family had ?thrived there. It was a very benign place.? He was amazed to discover ?how powerful that benign memory was.?

Thankfully for Doyle, the end results of his writing labours were a delight for his parents, who also feature in the book.

?They?re very pleased that I wrote it,? he says with a warm smile. ?And I have to acknowledge their great patience and faith in me to write the book, even though there were some things that they might disagree with.? His parents were the proud recipients of the first copy of the book, hot off the presses, when they visited their son in Toronto this past September. And among non-family readers, the book is doing almost as well. ?It?s doing well in terms of sales, a great interest. It?s early days yet,? he says. ?There?s the Irish audience obviously, people of Irish ancestry.? But now Doyle finds himself on the other side the equation, as the artist up for critique by some of his fellow critics.

?So far the reviews have been good. I?m a critic so I understand that reviews are only one way of getting attention,? he says. Ireland?s new found relationship with television, and that way in which it opened up new worlds for a generation of Irish people, was one of the central reasons why Doyle chose to come to Canada in the first place, and why he has been involved with the discourse of TV ever since. By the winter of 1979-1980, Doyle had completed his MA at University College Dublin, and was doing odd jobs in Dublin and ?trying to figure out what to do.? He applied to various universities in England, the United States and Canada in the hopes of pursuing his PhD abroad. ?I was particularly interested by a very thoughtful, personal response from a professor at York University in Toronto. I was very impressed by that,? he recalls. Doyle admits that, prior to 1980, "Canada had been a blur to me."

But a series of news reports on RTE in the lead up to the 1980 federal election focused the young Doyle?s attention on this northern nation. ?It was one of those rare periods when Canada was getting a lot of attention, even in Ireland,? he remembers. ?It was a great story of an international crisis.? RTE even sent a crew to Canada to do some reporting on what was called a constitutional crisis. The reports listed the usual biographical details of Canada, but the camera seemed transfixed on the Liberal leader, Pierre Elliot Trudeau. With his ?gunslinger pose,? the story was ?always going back to Trudeau.? ?He didn?t give a damn what anyone said,? he added about Trudeau, betraying a trait that both men share. When the image of Trudeau?s Canada faded from the screen, Doyle wrote, ?I sat there transfixed and said, ?I?ll go there.?? In person, he added that, because of what he had seen of Canada, he decided, ?I?d like to go there because it looks like an interesting place to be.?

With the TV reports, ?I started to get a much clearer picture of Canada?[with] a very charismatic, worldly, sophisticated French and English presence of Trudeau.? Now, thanks to his book of memoirs about his Irish boyhood and how it was shaped by television, Doyle has been given the opportunity to see more of his new adopted nation thanks to a recent book tour. But travel can be a curse, and talking too much about the same subject can make it a taboo subject for a while thereafter.

Upon returning from a recent book tour of Ottawa and Halifax, Doyle, his wife and some friends went out for dinner. Doyle was fairly knackered from his ?whirlwind? travels, and asked those at the table ?Please, nobody ask me questions about the book! Ask me about the hockey game.?

?At a certain point though, you do get tired of talking about yourself.?

A Great Feast of Light, published by Random House Canada, sells for $32.95??and it?s a bargain at the price!? Doyle is sure to add.